How the workplace of the future could leave women behind

If more companies let women work from home several days a week, helping them better juggle work and family, isn’t that a good thing?

Maybe not. As this long-term hybrid future comes into view, a group of academics, executives, gender-equality advocates and women themselves are increasingly worried that it might start to harden around new norms that hurt women rather than help them. Their fear is that women will take advantage of the hybrid benefit more than men, choosing to work more days at home, while companies subtly — or not so subtly — continue to favor employees who come into the office more often. Even if they say they won’t, employers will use frequent time with bosses and long hours in-person as the basis for advancing. Less formally, workers not in the office might miss impromptu conversations that lead to new opportunities. Over time, so-called hybrid friendly companies will develop two-tier workplaces — with the lowest tier populated mostly by women.

If hybrid work becomes both widespread and mostly an accommodation for women, “You entrench a women’s work ghetto,” said Brigid Schulte, director of New America’s Better Life Lab. “You are mommy tracked to the billionth degree.”

This new kind of class ceiling would come at a particularly precarious moment, when the mass exodus of women out of the labor market could lead to a slowdown in growth for the entire economy, to the tune of billions of dollars, according to one estimate.